Google released a new feature called Google Web History. Once you’ve enabled it, Google will start recording your entire browsing history. It does this by grabbing information from the Google toolbar that is sent for every page you access when you have Pagerank enabled.[…]

Um… HAHAHAHA! NO! THANKS!

While there may be a legitimate, and useful purpose, for a service like this I believe privacy concerns may trump all. In an era where the DHS can sapena records from search engine providers about what someone is looking at, why would a user want to take that a step further and hand them the whole shebang? Don’t give me that “if you’re not doing anything wrong…” angle excuse either. The whole thing is just too uncomfortable for me. Little big brother ish.

Last night I attempted to DVR the latest episode of Gilmore Girls. Much to my utter dismay the hard drive the computer was supposed to be recording to was completely full. Not exactly sure how that happened, but we have added a ton of music to it lately and I imagine deleting some of the older shows we had already watched may help a little.

“No problem,” says I, “I shall download the episode when it is released to the Internet later this evening.”

(A brief note to the MPAA and anyone else who might be thinking this is not legal. I only download shows I could have watched on our cable system and only when I don’t know they were on or the DVR/VCR doesn’t work. If the WB put it up with comercials on their website like the rest of the networks that are finally, if barely, beginning to understand the benefits of a new paradigm for media distribution, I would watch it there.) Oh… right… sorry. This is not a post on the refusal of Hollywood to change and adapt. I’ll write that some other time.

Anyway.

Back to my story.

I logged onto the site to watch for the file to get uploaded. After wearing out the F5 key, on what you may recall is a brand new keyboard, refreshing the screen I remembered that this site has an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel that will post a message automatically when a new show is uploaded. So I logged on.

As I’m sitting there with the chat channel open on one computer, and doing whatever it was I was doing on the other computer, this guy posts a message saying the church near his house has a billboard that has a different saying every week. This week’s saying, “Body piercings saved our lives.”

He said he had absolutely no idea what that meant, so I tried to tell him. He didn’t respond, but I thought that was kind of a cool message anyway, thus it is one of the two new taglines that will be randomized on this site.

The other is another message from that same billboard. “Stop, drop, and roll does not work in Hell.”

—

Later on, one of the other people in the channel regailed us with a couple of amusing stories from his career in technical support.

I had to fire a tech once after he spent 10 minutes trying to get a caller to follow directions. The caller had no idea what the tech was telling him to do, but when the tech began giving him instructions on unplugging and repacking the PC in the box it came in the caller followed those directions exactly. The tech then proceeded to instruct the caller to return the PC to the store and tell them he was to stupid to own one.

And.

I had spent over an hour on the phone with a man instructing him on something or other. When I was finished, he thanked me profusely and apppologized for being a difficult caller. I informed him that it was no trouble, it wasn’t like he was a brain surgeon, and that it was all part of my job. His response, “I’ve been a neuro surgeon for over 30 years.”

I just about fell out of my chair laughing when I read these. I would think he was making it up, but sadly, I know better.

And yes, I did get our show downloaded. Now if Treva would just get home from work so I could watch it :-).